Proving that Iranians don't have a monopoly on Twitter activism, young professional Pakistanis regularly tweet their minds

ISLAMABAD — Soon after the Supreme Court had declared former
President Pervez Musharraf's November 2007 emergency rule to be
illegal, Pakistani students, doctors, engineers and lawyers went online
to express their delight or annoyance.

One social networking website that brimmed with these voices,
displaying them within 140 characters or less, was Twitter.

"The nation should promise never to support unconstitutional steps
in future!" said one 'tweet.'

"If Pakistan's Supreme Court is so holier-than-thou, how come the
blind eye to [President] Zardari's corruption?" said another.

In the West, Twitter is used as much by college kids broadcasting
their daily lives as by celebrities, journalists and social activists.
But in Pakistan, the site is used mainly by professional, urban youths
who primarily seek to vent their political views. Tweets poke and
dissect the day's news — from the recent military operation in
Swat to the PPP-led government's failure to produce electricity —
and strive to explain a country that has become a crucial player on the
international stage. But in a country where only 10 percent of people
use the internet (17,500,000 users as of March 2008, according to
InternetWorldStats.com),
Twitter is clearly a very new phenomenon used almost entirely by those
with an agenda to raise issues before a global forum.

"I usually don't do personal tweets," said a 25-year-old student,
Abdullah Saad, who also runs a hardware and games review website.
"You'll find me tweeting either about technology or politics."

Consider a recent tweet by Saad: "Will the international media pick
up news about Government of Pakistan trying to stifle political
dissent?"

Saad first started using Twitter to organize rallies against
Musharraf when he sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry — almost
a year before Iran's citizens hit the news for similar reasons
following that country's controversial June presidential election.

"Twitter was easy to use and a fabulous tool to coordinate and get
your word out, in little or no time," he said.

But he admitted that the campaign wasn't on a scale observed later
in Iran. "There just weren't that many Pakistanis on it."

Data on the number of Twitter users in Pakistan is hard to come by.
ComScore, an international marketing research company, reports on 40
countries, but Pakistan is not one of them.

According to some users, the Twitter scene in Pakistan is growing
slowly, discretely and far more organically than it did in Iran.

Ammar Faheem, a 22-year-old telecom engineer said: "The Iranian
Twitter campaign had all the hallmarks of a well-organized and
deliberate campaign. Pakistanis are more genuine on this front."

Pakistani Twitterers are prone to voicing opinions more loudly and
clearly than ever before, having grown up in a vibrant and at times
aggressive media scene under Musharraf. From ridiculing the National
Reconciliation Ordinance that granted Zardari amnesty to, more
recently, rejecting a government directive that declared the sending of
"indecent, provocative and ill-motivated" text messages and emails an
offense punishable with up to 14 years, the Twitterati here is all
about defiance. Hamid Majid Abbasi, a 24-year-old student and freelance
writer, said that the government order relating to text and email,
though still in place, has largely been rejected by the Twitter
community. "It is just another lame excuse to stop a basic human right
— the freedom of speech. Rest assured, it will not succeed," he
said.

While text messages can become a significant irritant to the
authorities (Pakistan is one of the world's fastest-growing cellphone
markets, with user numbers growing 73 percent in 2007, according to a
Business Week report from that year), websites like Twitter are hardly
on their radar. Most political parties claim rural voter bases where
the internet is not widespread but cellphones are pervasive.

While politicians in countries such as the United States have
Twitter accounts to connect with voters, not a single Pakistani
political leader is present on the website (though there is no dearth
of hoax accounts).

Still, it was a small segment of urban activists that cracked
Musharraf's regime, not rural voters.

Nauman Qaiser, an active participant in the lawyers' movement for
the restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, wrote in The
Nation, a daily newspaper: "There is no doubt in my mind that it was
this unbridled and unrestrained usage of internet and mobile phones
— whereby not only the unpopular politicians were ridiculed...but
also large anti-government protests were orchestrated on short calls
— that ultimately proved quite instrumental in the downfall of
the Musharraf regime."

Realizing this potential of the online world not just for dissent
but for harmonious causes as well, Pakistan's more experienced Twitter
users launched a campaign on the website for the country's Independence
Day this year. They encouraged their countrymen to turn their avatars
green to symbolize the national flag on Aug. 14. The campaign, titled
"Go Green," aimed to make Pakistan one of the "trending" topics on
Twitter that particular day. Later, the effort swelled to targeting one
million display pictures on all social networks by next year.

"Imagine the dignity Pakistan will have on cyber space," said the
campaign's Facebook fan page.

"It may not achieve anything substantial," said one of the earliest
and most active Twitter users in the country, Dr. Awab Alvi, 34. "But I
see this movement as an opportunity to show the world that there are
decent, peace-loving people here who dearly love their country, and
that our country is not all about Taliban, bomb blasts and
terrorism."